Host-based authentication for login-based services must be disabled.

The use of .rhosts authentication is an insecure protocol and can be replaced with public-key authentication using Secure Shell. As automatic authentication settings in the .rhosts files can provide a malicious user with sensitive system credentials, the use of .rhosts files should be disabled.

Note: This is the location for Solaris 11.1. For earlier versions, the information is in /etc/pam.conf.

Determine if host-based authentication services are enabled.

# grep 'pam_rhosts_auth.so.1' /etc/pam.conf /etc/pam.d/*| grep -vc '^#'

If the returned result is not 0 (zero), this is a finding.

Note: This is the location for Solaris 11.1. For earlier versions, the information is in /etc/pam.conf.

The root role is required.

# ls -l /etc/pam.d to identify the various configuration files used by PAM.

Search each file for the pam_rhosts_auth.so.1 entry.

# grep pam_rhosts_auth.so.1 [filename]

Identify the file with the line pam_hosts_auth.so.1 in it.

# pfedit [filename]

Insert a comment character (#) at the beginning of the line containing "pam_hosts_auth.so.1".